Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Are all pennies copper? At school, eighth graders are scrambling around fixing scripts, testing demonstrations, and rehearsing for their biggest presentation they have ever faced. Nobel Prize is the name of that stress wrenching, information packed and time consuming presentation. Each day is crucial to work on the Nobel Prize project for these nervous students.

Well today in fourth period a boy and his Nobel Prize Project partners showed the class how to make altoys. First, he boiled a clear substance (IMNaDH) and put in Zinc. Then, slowly he carefully dropped in a shiny copper penny into the mixture. While the science class watched in awe the penny’s outer copper coating started to disappear! Leaving in its place a shiny silver penny! At the end of his intriguing presentation he steps in front of the class and calls out, “Hey! Who want’s this penny?!”. Hands shoot up and voices shouting and calling out to him. Startled and then a sly grin creeps onto the boy's face face. “Pick a number between zero and three hundred”, he declares. Emma Van Doren sitting in the front row calls out “183!”. Then following Emma other voices call out, “‘1!’, ‘269!’, ‘42!’...” the boy looking slightly dazed looks straight and Emma and says, “What did you say again?”, Emma replies with her number 183. The boy thinks for a minute with himself and then hands surprised and giddy Emma the shiny penny. Everyone all at once, like on que, started calling out to Emma, "I'll give you a dollar for the penny!" Or "LUCKY!!" Or even, "I thought we were friends!" he just smiled and said, "the number was 170! She was the closest." Emma just smiles as her table neighbors admire the penny. Well who has ever seen a silver penny!